Making your business trustworthy is not a chore but an art form that everyone should be eager to take on. Most people think that once their SSL and PCI are in check you don’t really need much more. However, most people fail to realize that so far they’ve gained the trust of banks, institutions and payment gateways, but what about customers? Most customers have no idea what PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) means what SSL (Secure Sockets Layer – This allows for data/message confidentiality) does.
So, what’s left? Making your business known, reliable, and open. There is a rumor going around that social media is pretty much the death of a business because people bash, whine and make a business look unreliable. But as the saying goes – don’t believe everything you hear! Social media can make your business sink but it can also make your business the IT business to be a customer of!
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Marketing is a very broad and open topic that can cover pretty much anything. However, it’s the job of every good analyst to know exactly what pays off. In this post we are going to explore the three main reasons why videos are becoming so popular and worthwhile in marketing and branding.
First there was Twitter and Facebook where sharing your short thoughts was a great way to provoke customers in engaging with companies, then we had Instagram which brought on the era of imagery and visualizations, and at last we’ve moved onto videos with YouTube, Vine, MixBit and now even Instagram Videos. According to a Youon Infographic a page with just text will be looked at for an average of 48sec whereas a page with a video can drive up to 5 min and 50 sec on a website!
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Every seller’s dream is to have as much traffic that generates buys, as possible. However, achieving this is not as easy as it seems. A lot of people spent enormous amounts of money on advertising, all in order to bring more customers to their website. Why is it then, that the average rate of e-commerce conversion is somewhere between 1-5%? What are store owners doing wrong?
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Social media is a piece of cake, right? All you do is post, tweet or like, retweet, comment, follow and unfollow. There are no rules since it’s all anonymous (or at least safe from in front of your screen)… Well, maybe in theory. Assuming you want to use social media not for trolling, but to actually have conversations or meet interesting people, you might want to follow a few simple (and one might even say obvious) rules.
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It’s been a year since the launch of Google+ and one might wonder what’s happened in that time – no doubt Google is working hard to promote their social network. On one hand we see impressive growth numbers, but on the other we still spend more time on Facebook and hear that many of the Google+ profiles are in fact ‘dead’. Although Google has already shut down some of their projects in the past, it’s difficult to imagine that the same awaits their social network – it’s in a too advanced stage to back down and, as it seems, Google cares too much about it. So what does the future hold for Google+?
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You may be a Twitter enthusiast or think it’s just a big mess and no tool will allow to fully control it. But the thing here is that Twitter simply works. Millions of people use it to share information or ask questions and that’s why it’s worth your interest. And as they say: since you can’t beat them – join them.
There’s lots of noise in Twitter streams, so being engaging is pretty much crucial. Doing it “manually” (asking questions, being controversial etc.) is one thing, but it would be unwise not to use Twitter’s mechanisms designed to help people connect.
Retweeting is about spreading the news, engaging, appreciating good content and so on. Here are a few tips that will help you write tweets which should spread all over the Internet.
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I suppose we all have private profiles on Facebook and probably on Twitter as well. Some of us have LinkedIn accounts for building and maintaining professional networks, but we use Foursquare for fun. And we still remember the golden age of MySpace and Friendster.
Social networking became a part of our everyday online life just a few years ago. But do you remember the trends changes? When the Facebook began to rule the world and when the Friendster shifted to the low position in social rankings?
The race for Internet domination’s graph (created by OnlineSchools.org) shows the career path of social networking: http://www.onlineschools.org/state-of-the-internet/soti.html
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We’re happy to finish this week with two small updates. The first one is just cosmetics, but if you’re a regular visitor to our blog, you’ll surely notice it.
Yep, we have new icons! Our own, hand drawn ones. And since the blog is called “Across the Board“, we wanted to make the icons look a little like drawn and a whiteboard or a chalkboard. Though we managed to achieve that in big pictures, the effect almost vanished after resizing them to icon-size. Either way, we like the new pictures and hope you’ll like them as well. Notice, that some of the pictures have changed and the new ones are more adequate, which should make it easier to navigate.
The second change should be an even better treat. We changed all the social media buttons. Now it’s easier and more comfortable for you to share our posts with your friends.
So here’s what happened: we got rid of the social buttons on the bottom of all posts. Instead of them you now have a floating box with sharing buttons on each post page. If you find anything interesting , you can promote our blog by spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and tumblr.
Update: What’s more, you can now share our posts also on delicious, digg, reddit, Hacker News, via e-mail and everything else you choose using addThis.
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